It's raining on the polder.  The land is frypan-flat, so you can see the anvil-shaped clouds from miles away.  The ducks like it: ambling across the lawn in a tight group, chatting sociably among themselves, they're dispatching a slug a second from its mortal coil.  Their upright postures, their elegant black-and-white or tan-and-beige plumage, and the familiar modulations of their vocalizations seem like a satire of human self-importance; the ducks look like tiny senators or businessmen.  Inside the house, we sit in the living room, reading or sewing silently, in the company of the dog and two kittens.

Holland largely conforms to America's imagination of it, with rustic windmills, ancient buildings, and a dense population.  In contrast, the Noordoostpolder is farmland sparsely dotted with mid-century concrete government constructions. The farm we are working on lies 3 meters below sea level.  Seventy years ago, it was under water.  In the late 1920s, construction began on the first of a series of massive civil engineering projects in the Zuiderzee, a large bay of the North Sea.  In 1932, the Zuiderzee was cut off from the ocean by an enormous dyke, and the process of desalinization began.  A decade later, during the Nazi occupation, the Noordoostpolder ("Northeast-polder," "polder" being a word for land reclaimed from the sea through the use of dikes, canals, and pumps) was drained of its water and began to be cultivated for agricultural production.  The soil is rich silt deposits originating from the Alps, washed in from the Rhine River.  This enriched ground and a high water table make the Noordoostpolder the breadbasket of the Netherlands.  By design, its land is given over almost entirely to intensive agriculture.

Jenna and I work for Henrike, whose small vegetable farm is an independent entity within her partner, Digni's, larger farm.  Both farms are organic.  They grow a large variety of high-quality produce, including lima beans, fennel, beets, spinach, carrots, corn, and zucchini - but this list doesn't even come close to naming all of the growing things on Henrike and Digni's farms.  Jenna and I harvested an enormous amount of garlic from Henrike's plot last week, our primary task.  We've also worked a little bit for Digni and his son Krispijn, weeding, cutting cabbage, and harvesting multi-colored carrots.  The cabbage is destined for a sauerkraut factory.  Digni's is the only farm that supplies this factory, and the factory is the only one in the Netherlands; therefore, if you happen to be in Europe this fall and you buy some Dutch saurkraut, it came from Digni's fields.  It's a hell of a process to harvest the cabbage, by the way: you're equipped with a serrated mini-machete, and with a violent combination of a stab to the root and a hard twist, you decapitate the two-foot-diameter cabbages from their outer leaves.  Then you have to pick them up (they weigh up to 20 pounds) and Larry Bird them into wooden crates towed by a tractor.  

Henrike and Digni are wonderful people.  They share a home, and a room, but they are very clear that the business between them is separate, although Henrike will sometimes lend Digni her tractor or add the labor of her WWOOFers to his paid crew, and he, likewise, helps her out with tractors or labor when she gets busy.  Henrike is a former sports instructor for adults from Germany, and she's tough and strong, but also a very kind and accepting teacher who understands that Jenna and I are new to all of this.  Henrike works at unimaginable speed, often literally sprinting from task to task.  She's also inexaustible.  After a day cutting and pitching cabbages, she breezily mentioned that she needed to have dinner early, so she could go teach a Body Pump workshop that evening.  Jenna and I, who were puddles on the floor at that point, attempted to contain our disbelief.  I wish I could be half as productive.  Her English is perfect, prompting me, for the umpteenth time on this trip, to thank my lucky stars that this most widely-comprehended language is my mother tongue.  Digni came across as a little gruff at first - a characteristically Dutch trait - and neither Jenna nor I were sure if he liked us.  There's a book on Dutch ettiquette and manners written for ex-pats sitting on the shelf of the caravan we call home here.  It conjectures that Dutch straight-talk derives from the historical influence of Calvinism, which holds flattery and ceremony in disdain, on Dutch society.  It may well be.  Digni radiates competence and commands respect, which can be daunting.  Initially, it was difficult not to see his eminent capabilities in practical matters as an exemplar against which to score my personal deficiencies.  After breaking bread with him for some time, I see him now as a much more rounded and gentle character.  He's opened up a lot in the days we've been here and said some really nice things to us. 

Bikes are a less dominant form of transportation here than in Amsterdam, but still very useful.  The polder is roughly circular.  If it were a wheel, the main town of Emmeloord (population 25,000) would be the hub, with 11 small communities at the terminal ends of the spokes.  All of the towns are within easy biking distance of Emmeloord.  We are closer to Ens (population 2,000).  Ens is more or less a small grocery store, a few apartment blocks, and a drug store staffed by surly employees who seemingly don't want my money.  A third WWOOFer, Daniel, arrived from Amsterdam a couple days ago, and the three of us rode to Emmeloord together after work.  It's easily the least beautiful city we've seen thus far, epitomizing the utilitarian ethos that pervades the Noordoostpolder.  The buildings are low, concrete is prevalent, and the stores are similar to what you might expect from an American roadside shopping plaza.  The town is built around a red-brick street mall terrorized by an anarchic admixture of bicycle, moped, and pedestrian traffic with no discernable method in its movements.  As orderly and well-planned as most aspects of Dutch urbanism are, the bicycle traffic is a terrifying scourge from which there is no refuge, because Dutch bicyclists are like electrons: potentially everywhere, moving in every direction, simultaneously.

The animals are a source of great amusement here.  There are, as I mentioned, two kittens, maybe three months old, holding all of us in their thrall.  We all vie for their fickle affections, and I think they know it.  These attentions are, of course, closely correlated with the likelihood that you will pour them a bowl of milk.  Even Rox, the border collie mutt, likes the kittens.  He will herd one or the other around the room, then pin it to the floor and gently chew on it.  Bizarrely, the kittens are complicit in this play, and purr as Rox nuzzles and gnaws them.  Rox lives a very good life.  He follows Digni's workers out onto the field every day and chases the weeds as they get pulled from the soil.  He's usually muddy, and always grinning.

Days on the farm follow a simple rhythm.  We wake up in our (very small) caravan at 6:40, perform our morning ablutions, and come into the main house for breakfast.  Typically, this is toast with a choice of spreads - butter, beet-sugar molasses, peanut butter, yeast spread (like Marmite, but lighter) - or muesli with yogurt or milk (or soy versions thereof).  Almost all the food in Henrike and Digni's household is organic, and most of it comes from local providers.  We eat on wooden discs, like cutting boards.  Work begins around 7:30, and we break for coffee at 9:30.  A coffee breaks are taken seriously in the Netherlands.  Coffee or tea is served outside, if the weather is good, along with a small snack.  We work again until noon, when we eat lunch.  We have another coffee break, signalling the end of our workday, at 3:00.  If we were paid crew, we would go back out until 5 PM, but WWOOFers are only expected to put in 30 hours a week or so.  We've gone out a few times after work on our bikes to swim at a nearby nettle-farm-cum-resort-cum-vanity-project, but often opt to stay in and read.  We also cook a lot.  Jenna has continued her pre-Europe baking streak, and made some delicious zucchini- and carrot-breads. 

It's hard to overestimate what an amazing time we're having here.  I know that I will remember this for the rest of my life as a positive, formative experience.  We're working hard every day and going to bed with the tiredness that comes from exertion.  It's a welcome change from my jobs in Philadelphia to be able to identify visible and quantifiable products of my labor at the end of the day.

Our most recent attempt at CouchSurfing, I'm relieved to say, seems to have been successful.  We sent out 8 or 10 Couch "requests" to hosts in Copenhagen, and received some awesome and wonderful replies.  Even the people who couldn't host us had some really encouraging things to say.  We received two definite yesses, one from a woman who lives in a radical housing co-op near Christiania, and can show us around the area, especially the occupied (squatted) spaces.  The other yes is from a fellow who just moved onto a boat!  He offered to host us with the caveat that it's pretty small and he hasn't hosted people in his boat yet, but one doesn't look a night on a boat in Copenhagen in the mouth.  I'm hoping to split our nights between these hosts.

 
We were conveyed to the Netherlands by a Megabus from Edinburgh, with a change-over in London.  The administration of the ride was a mess.  Somehow, the Megabus passengers to London were separated into two different busses (neither was full to capacity), one of which (ours) made stops in Newcastle and Leeds, which I'm not sure it was supposed to.  The drivers had disputes with bus station officials. No one seemed to know where the passengers were supposed to get off.  There was no water or toilet paper in the bus.  We were very late to London, but they held the London-Amsterdam bus for the Edinburgh connecting passengers.  I had hoped to sleep once we switched busses in London, but we had to all get out of the bus for the ferry ride, which was fully lit, loud, and had nowhere to lie down.  I slept a little on the ferry and the bus afterwards, but probably only a couple hours.

On the ride, I read How Can You Defend Those People?, an account of James Kunen's time as a public defender in Washington, D.C.  James Kunen, strangely, is the author of The Strawberry Statement, an influential first-hand report on the late-'60s student occupation of Columbia University.  It seemed like an appropriate follow-up to Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity, which is also about public defenders.  Actually, de la Pava does a better job of answering the titular question of Kunen's book than Kunen does, but I liked How Can You Defend Those People? anyway.

We couldn't get any Couch Surfers to host us in Amsterdam.  It's a bad sign, since we're relying on it for much of our time in Europe.  Amsterdam hosts are inundated with requests at this time of year; I'm hoping other cities will be a little less crowded, and easier to find a host in.  We booked the cheapest available hostel, near the Oosterpark, south-east of the city center.

The first thing we noticed about Amsterdam was the bikes.  I had heard Amsterdam was a "bike-friendly city," in the way people say that Minneapolis or Portland, for example, are "bike-friendly cities" because of their bike lanes, navigable layouts, and large number of bike commuters (in Portland, the number one city in the United States for bike commuting, almost 6% of workers travel by bike).  The difference is that in Amsterdam, bikes represent the majority of city traffic.  The bikes are predominantly the sturdy, heavy, classic Dutch cruiser style, which make sense in a city as flat as Amsterdam.  There are more bikes than cars.  On the small streets, cars share the road; on larger through-ways, there are wide bike lanes, separated from the road and the sidewalk by curbs.  Amsterdam should be a model to U.S. cities seeking to improve their bicycle infrastructure.

The parking garage in the background is also packed with bikes.  How do people manage to find their own bikes in this mess?

The Dutch also like comically tiny cars

After the bikes, the second and third things we noticed about Amsterdam were the heat and the trash.  It was probably 30 degrees hotter in Amsterdam than when we got on the bus in Edinburgh.  Also, for as beautiful a city as Amsterdam is, it's downright filthy.  The canals are dirty, almost every trash can is overflowing, and the parks are full of plastic bags, takeout containers, bottles and cans, and cigarette cartons.  It's possible that Amsterdam's infrastructure is ordinarily better equipped to deal with garbage, and is just temporarily overwhelmed in the height of tourist season.  Whatever the reason, the trash tarnished the city's charm somewhat.

But what charm it has.







The famous houseboats were fantastic:

Also, there was this guy

We visited both the very beautiful Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.  The Rijksmuseum has been under construction for a decade or something, but most of the hits are on display.

The corrugated-metal storage container really contributes to the majesty of the place

 

The collection is fairly small - all Dutch artists, with Rembrant prominently featured.  There are also a number of Vermeers.  Rembrandt is cool and everything, good grasp of light and color, etc., but Vermeer has something that sets his work apart from his peers in a way that's hard to describe.  I'm too much of a boor to appreciate still lifes and portraiture, for the most part, which constituted a lot of the Rijksmuseum collection, but I do like Vermeer.

River View by Moonlight, Aert Van der Neer

Still Life with Turkey Pie, Pieter Claesz

The Threatened Swan, Jan Asselijn

The Night Watch, Rembrandt

 

Portrait of Gerard Bicker, Bartholomeus van der Helst

View of Houses in Delft, Vermeer

The Milkmaid, Vermeer

Some of my favorite things from the collection were the 16th-18th century Dutch furniture and earthenware.

This is probably the cruelest cabinet in existence: tortoise-shell inlaid with ivory

I was daunted by the line outside the Van Gogh Museum, but I'm glad I stuck with it.  The queue moved quickly, and inside was some of the best art I've ever seen.  Obviously, there were a huge number of Van Gogh's works from all periods of his oeuvre.  It's arranged chronologically, beginning with his first sketches and early still-lifes, through his brown-and-black peasant studies, to his colorful and loose Arles paintings, and ending with his spiral into near-abstraction in the years before his suicide.  Unfortunately, there were no photos allowed.  None of the following pictures are mine:

Room at Arles, Van Gogh

Wheatfield with Crows, Van Gogh

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, Van Gogh

Tree Roots and Trunks, Van Gogh (possibly his final painting)

Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh Painting, Gauguin

Portrait of Guus Preitinger, the Artist's Wife, Kees van Dongen

Breton Girl Spinning, Gauguin

La Recolte des Foins, Éragny, Pissarro

There was also a stupendous exhibit of fin de siècle prints by artists such as Édouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton (my new favorite artist), and Jean-Émile Laboureur.  Once again, some of the best weren't available online:

Trottoir-Roulant, Vallotton

La Manifestation, Vallotton

La Petite Blanchisseuse, Bonnard

Saint-Tropez II, Signac

Tiger in the Jungle, Paul Ranson

Although the Van Gogh Museum contained a lot of excellent material, it's pretty small.  We only spent a few hours there. 

We did pass through the Red Light District, almost reluctantly.  At our hostel, we met another American, Ryan, who's studying in London and had just arrived in Amsterdam a few hours before, and the three of us went to see what it was about.  It was sort of interesting, but less than I expected.  Perhaps it's because the prostitution seems so un-seedy, safe, and efficient.  The girls, at least the ones in the windows, are suprisingly pretty and don't seem desperate, although this is probably an illusion - most of the prostitutes are foreigners without much education, often trafficked in from Eastern Europe by unscrupulous pseudo-pimps.  Most people in the neighborhood were tourists, like us, there out of curiosity, or to buy marijuana and overpriced beer.  The seedy aspects were much the same as the ones you'd expect from a large college campus on a Saturday night.  There were bros, or the European equivalent thereof, as far as the eye could see.  We passed through one alleyway where an obviously beleaguered resident had put up signs imploring (in English, Dutch, and via illustrations) passers-by not to urinate, vomit, or shit on their doorstep.  That there must have been enough bodily fluid incidents in this single alleyway to necessitate multi-lingual signage is a testament to how mind-bogglingly awful the Red Light District is.

Ryan and me in the Red Light District

On Monday, we picked up bread and a tomato tapenade for a picnic brunch on our way to rent bikes.  I wish we hadn't pushed the bike rental back to our last full day in Amsterdam, because it was a total joy, and an excellent way to get around the city (the drawback is that it costs something like 15 euros for 24 hours, or 9 euros for 3 hours - ouch).  We biked through the famous Jordaan neighborhood, filled with 17th-century row houses converted to galleries, coffee shops, and antique stores.  We ate in a green space next to a house-boat.


We biked past a couple of squats on Spuistraat, covered in graffiti and slogans.





I felt somewhat melancholy.  The Netherlands are the Mecca of squatting.  Until 2010, it was essentially legal to occupy abandoned buildings.  Squatting is something I've always been interested in, at least in principle.  I don't have a very friendly relationship with the capitalist economy: I did everything I was supposed to to appease it, and yet it seems intent on burying me.  Squatting offers an out from the tyranny of the paycheck, and so I like it.  It also makes simple sense: there are thousands of buildings that municipal governments have possessed for non-payment of taxes standing empty in the U.S., deteriorating until the city sees fit to use your tax dollars to demolish them.  I am a person who wants to occupy and improve these buildings.  This seems eminently reasonable, and yet the law holds that this a crime.  I'm digressing: the point is that a few years ago, I would have been really excited to see Amsterdam's squats, but now, I hadn't even thought about it and would've missed them entirely, had my touristy bike route not accidentally led me past them.  I would love to meet some squatters and gain some knowledge about the practical aspects of squatting, but I don't even know where to begin to do that.  I'm not politically radical enough, for one thing, and I feel like I've become so comfortable in my role as a young urban working guy (or whatever) that I would seem disconnected and soft to squatters.  I now feel like I'll always be an outsider to that scene, and that's sort of a sad thing to come to grips with.  It's a strange feeling to have a dream die, not because you're no longer interested, but because you recognize the reality that you can't be the kind of person who can make that dream happen, the kind of person you thought you were.

Our biking route was haphazard, but that was the idea from the start.  We returned the bikes and walked to the Jewish Historical Museum, which is housed in a former synagogue.  In the basement was a collection of Jewish artifacts ranging from 17th century Torah finials to 1920s art deco seder plates.

Circumcision toolbox

Modern clock

Seder plate.  The thing on the right is a light to aid in the ritual of searching out your last crumbs of chametz before Passover

Ascending to the ground level and second story, the museum presented a history of Dutch Judaism.  Unexpectedly, three Marc Chagall paintings were on temporary loan from some or another foundation, shoehorned into a section of hallway near the old synagogue's mikveh.

The most interesting part of the museum was a multimedia installation by William Kentridge, Black Box.  Kentridge is a white South African Jewish artist whose work is highly political, as that complex ancestry might imply.  Black Box is a commentary on the genocide committed by German colonial forces against the rebelling Herero and Namaqua peoples of Namibia.  The work consists of mechanized figures moving over a projected backdrop of Kentridge's animated charcoal drawings and historical documents from the colonial period, set to Namibian music.  The stated concept of the work was to examine how Enlightenment ideals of human equality were twisted to promote genocide and colonial brutality.  The ties between colonial genocide and the Holocaust were obvious, and some of the themes of collective memory, mourning, and guilt in Black Box would seem likely to resonate with the Dutch Jewish community, which was decimated in the concentration camps.  It was a very moving and dark piece of art, and I was grateful that we came to Amsterdam while it was on display.  Some of the charcoal drawings Kentridge incorporated into Black Box were hung near the installation theater:






Caving to touristy pressure, we bought tickets for a canal tour.  People are constantly moving through the canals of Amsterdam by boat, and they all look like they're having fun, with their picnic lunches and their wine.  I wanted a piece of that fun.  And it actually was pretty fun, although less romantic and dreamy, more crowded and pedagogical.  We saw some new parts of the city and got to peek into the windows of swanky 17th-century houses, a favorite activity of mine.  Amsterdam looks great by boat.







Our experiences with food in Amsterdam were hit-or-miss.  The first night, after seeing the Rijksmuseum, we wandered through a dense commercial district with tons of restaurants, all expensive.  We settled on a Thai place, which seemed a little cheaper than the rest.  We should have left when they refused to serve tap water, trying to get us to cough up 3 euros for a bottle of water or 4 for a pot of tea (!!!), but instead we stayed and got smacked with an unexpected charge for rice (2.50 euros per bowl, or something similarly ridiculous).  The service was terrible and the food was just okay, and we ended up feeling pretty miserable about how much money we shelled out for a shitty meal.

One of the things I'd gotten really excited about in Amsterdam was the number of Surinamese restaurants.  Suriname is a small South American country, formerly a Dutch colony.  Its unusual demographics arose from overseas workers brought in to work the valuable plantations and mines in Suriname.  Originally, these workers were African slaves, until the slave trade was abolished in the 1860s (incidentally, many of these slaves escaped to the jungles of Suriname, where they developed independent and unique tribal societies and waged war on the plantations.  Plantation owners were forced to make recognize the rebel slaves' independence and pay them tribute); at this point, the Dutch began importing Javanese and Chinese workers from the Dutch East Indies (now part of Indonesia) and Hindus from the Indian subcontinent.  Surinamese cuisine is a mixture of all of these culinary traditions.  Menu items might include Indonesian nasi goreng and gado gado, tempeh sandwiches,  Indian roti with cassava, chop suey, Creole chicken and bean stew, and fried plantains.  Because Surinamese food has such an expansive scope, many Surinamese restaurants in Amsterdam focus on a particular approach - for example, Indian- or Javanese-Surinamese.  I chose to eat at Kam Yin, a Chinese/Surinamese place in Amsterdam's Chinatown, abutting the Red Light District.  The food was cheap and delicious.

This roti was beyond belief

It's hard to see a city in three days, even though I think we used our time well.  I'm sure we're going to feel this way about everywhere we go in Europe.  I'm really sorry we missed the world's oldest botanical gardens and the Tropical Museum, both of which look awesome.

Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam

Tropenmuseum

I'd also like to see the Dapper Market, a large open-air pedestrian bazaar where goods ranging from fresh fruit to bike parts are sold out of tents and carts, and the food vendors are supposed to be great.  We walked through the Dapper Market area in the evening, after the market had closed up.  It's primarily an African and South American neighborhood, with many shops catering to the Netherlands' immigrant communities.

On Tuesday, we were up and checked out of our hostel early, and walked with our packs to the natural foods market, in preparation for the day of travel which would take us to our first WWOOFing farm in the Noordoostpolder, where I am presently writing.  There's a lot to say about our experiences at the farm, which will have to wait for another day. 

Without much context for comparison, I find it hard to judge Amsterdam's merits relative to other European cities.  Certainly, it conforms more to the American idea of Europe than Reykjavik or Edinburgh, but that's unsurprising.  There were things I liked and things I didn't (bros, mostly), and many things that struck me as unique that probably aren't, and maybe I should hold final judgment until I've become inured to the novelty of pre-18th-century architecture and funny accents.